India to Boast Most Facebook Users by 2017

Although Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide; India, Brazil, Russia, Middle East and Africa mark the highest number of Worldwide Facebook users. eMarketer recently published estimates of its usage statistics in the coming years, broken down by region and country.

Facebook the social network Giant passed 1 billion users mark few months back in October 2012. As the company sees a strong growth in its Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa, and Latin American user bases, it successfully acquired the badge of 1 billion active users in December 2012 and is expected to reach 1 billion active users globally in 2013.

By next year, Facebook will reach 1.26 billion global users. The new figures represent individual monthly active users who access Facebook via any device at least once per month. That’s different from Facebook’s reported figures, as it includes duplicates all monthly active users —such as pets, brands and other types of pages/accounts, along with individual users.

There will be certain amount of rise and decline in the use of Facebook in different countries. The Facebook user base in North America is expected to grow by only 3.6% this year, compared to 34.4% in the Asia-Pacific region, 29.5% in Latin America, 31.8% in the Middle East and Africa and 29.3% in central and Eastern Europe. In Western Europe as a whole, penetration is somewhat lower, at 37% of the population in 2013.

Facebook has been accelerating its business development efforts in places like Brazil as it is expected to grow its 69 million users this year to 103.9 million in 2017.

Asia-Pacific leads the rest of the world not only in Facebook user growth, but in sheer number of Facebook users. By 2017, eMarketer estimates, 616 million internet users in Asia-Pacific will use Facebook at least monthly, with nearly half that number coming from India alone. India is projected to have the most number of Facebook users i.e. 277.8 million by 2017.